


O Captain, My Captain

by hickorysleeve



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Domme Natasha Romanov, F/F, F/M, Natasha as fandom bicycle, Platonic BDSM, dark at times, increased history for Natasha, lying by omission, weaponized sexuality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-03 07:44:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1736774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hickorysleeve/pseuds/hickorysleeve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are layers to everything, like a nesting doll.</p>
<p>Natasha's history and the things she's done to survive it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is, hopefully, going to be a long piece. Each chapter (or couple of chapters) is going to cover a piece of her history and an event that shaped the woman she became. Chronologically speaking, the events of the story take place from late 1947/early 1948 to the present. If I don't end up posting them chronologically, there will be a note that the chapter is out of chronology.
> 
> Also, one million apologies for my Google translate Russian transliteration. If anyone has any insight on better ways to tranlate/transliterate the worlds, please let me know.

Natalia Romanov is a small child and she does not entirely remember how she ended up with the name of the people who were overthrown from the throne many years before her birth. She is small and innocent when the fire takes her family from her, when _krasno-zal_ takes her life away and puts in this place a girl they call Natalia. She can no longer remember what her mother called her.

There are fourteen other girls that year, and a man that stands nearby them, observing them from shadows, with a dark, haunted look in his eyes. His Russian is atrocious, his demeanor still oozing with swagger despite the deep, ugly bruises that radiate from his temples. The first time Natalia wakes to hearing screaming from one of the other girls, and sees those bruises on her temples as she stares, dead-eyed, outward at the rest of them the next morning, Natalia knows she will do all she can to avoid them. She knows, though, that it is likely inevitable.

When the man with the poor Russian accent tells them he is disappointed in them, that they are a disgrace--to Russia, to _krasno-zal_ , to each other and him--she is sixteen years old, and it has been three years since she was taken in by these people. She calculates, to herself, the likelihood that this man's condemnation will result in her visiting _kirchat'-zal_. She calculates, to herself, the risks inherent in beseeching this man to save her from the fate of bruises radiating from her temples.

After he dismisses them, cold and offhanded, she scuttles after him. She is small, smaller than many of the other girls, and though she's sixteen now, puberty has not yet touched her; she is still lean and androgynous and round in the face. He stares down his nose at her.

"I want to be better," she says. "You are the best."

He asks, "How old are you now?"

"Sixteen."

"You should have become a _vdovy_ by now."

She screws up her face, serious and determined. He stares at her, heartless, eyes like ice flows.

In the morning, he hands her a dossier. "Harbin," he says, and she opens the dossier. "You have one week."

From her pocket money that _krasno-zal_ gives her--most of the girls use it to head into the city by bus or train, but Natalia has always saved it for herself--she scrounges a train ticket to the East, and she barters a truck ride in the frigid cold from Blagovshchensk to Harbin. All the while, she studies the dossier, studies the man in it, the target, and what information she could slip from public records and _krasno-zal_ surveillances about his associates. There is a man with him with a taste for young, small girls like Natalia, and she will use it to her advantage. She will use it to prove that she can be taught by _Zima Soldat_.

She follows her plans to the letter. She lets the associate of the target pick her up, lets him touch her thigh and the small of her back and breathe hot and wet in her ear, stinking of _baijiu_. She lets him pass her around to other large men, stinking of liquor and cigars. When the first one tries to stick a finger in her, she slips away; and within twenty minutes, they are dead.

Her hands shake as she comes to the train station for her extraction. She changes from the dress she was in into drab clothing and boards the train headed for the border. _Zima Soldat_ sits behind her and does not speak.

At the border, they stay in a flophouse until a truck comes for them. She curls in the corner, stony, refusing to let those wandering hands fill her thoughts.

"You were efficient," _Zima Soldat_ says from across the space at her. It is almost, she supposes, praise, and she glows in it for a moment, nodding and staring at her knees. "You exploited their weakness. That was very smart of you."

"Thank you, Comrade."

He looks speculative, like there might be some sort of apology on the inside of his lips. She looks at him and behind the haunted, icy eyes and the bruises on his temples, behind the dusting of beard and his stupid haircut, she supposes he was once an attractive man, about ten or twenty years older than her perhaps--though she knows he's been put on ice, that his age is a fragile, nebulous thing like smoke. She lays down on the single, narrow bed and does not sleep. In the gray of early morning, they are collected. The soldiers that bring them in look at her curiously; she knows, then, that he did not tell anyone she was going and she wonders if she will be put to _kirchat'-zal_ for that.

Three days later, he stands before her.

"You are to be my charge, when I am present. You will train from me."

They have a year of uninterrupted training, and Natalia is aware of this growing bubble of interest in her gut. She ignores it, presses it into a dark corner of her mind and refuses to acknowledge that it consumes her in the nights, consumes her and makes her will and fervor to follow his orders and make him proud that much more heightened.

He does missions more after the first year. She dances, does small missions, is trained in the way of the _vdovy_. Sometimes, the next time she sees him, the bruises on his temples are fresh, and she knows to avoid him until one of his handlers releases him and his eyes no longer hold that vacant inability to process who she is.  Those times, though, come closer and closer together, until there is a year where she sees nothing of him, and she worries.

At eighteen, she begins to blossom. The commanders of _krasno-zal_ send her on quiet, nearly solo missions--never truly on her own, she has not proven herself to be a _vdovy_ yet, but she is let in on these men without direct supervision, and she lets her blooming body do a lot of her work for her. She never lets a man get more intimate with her than a brush of fingers at the apex of her thighs--and there are a few men that she makes suffer for trying, including one of her commanders who thought that her return from a mission still dressed in a slinking, low-cut dress meant that she was inviting the attentions of a fifty year old Soviet soldier.

She is nearly nineteen when she sees the _Soldat_ again. He has not aged, and she hurts to see it. She speaks with his handlers, discussing his familiarity with _krasno-zal_ and the world as they know it, until he comes from his rooms and frowns at her and says, in his awful Russian, "You shouldn't talk to other people about me, _myshonok_ , it's very rude."

Later, she brings a bottle of vodka and food from the canteen to his room. She knocks with her elbow and waits to be let in. He is squinting and quiet, much more quiet than she's seen him in ages, it seems; for when they were training, she discovered that he had quite the mouth on him, full of opinions and vinegar and piss about their lot in life.

She puts the tray and bottle down and inclines her head to him.

"I wanted to make sure you ate, Comrade."

"And the vodka?"

"You seemed like you could use it."

He opens that before he even looks at the food. She sits on the table top, her head bowed slightly.

"Are you of the _vdovy_ yet, _mysha_?" She shakes her head and he frowns at her a little. "What are you going to do? They'll destroy you soon."

"I have a test, tomorrow, to see if I enter. I'm supposed to dance for them." She smooths out her pants and is quiet a moment. "They wanted me to demonstrate something else, but I told them I wouldn't. I told them dance would be a best demonstration of my skills."

_Zima Soldat_ looks at her, quiet and questioning, and she offers nothing more for some time, almost sheepish around him. This is the first time she's spent in his rooms, and they are so vastly different than the dormitory she shares with the other girls in the program--some of them already _vdovy_ , some of them still training, all of them lithe and beautiful and far more lovely than her own plainness speaks of.

He sits, offers her some vodka, and asks, "Why haven't you made it yet, _mysha_?"

"They don't think I'm very good at seducing people."

"I've seen you before," he says, as if that negated their opinion. She shrugs and looks down at the glass in her hands. It is clear, and the liquid refracts slightly, so that it almost looks as if she is only holding the vodka in her fingers, suspended by some strange gift or magic. After a long time, _Zima Soldat_ says to her, "What gave them this idea that you're not very good at seduction."

"I have opinions about what a man should be allowed to touch," she says. There's no bite in her words, only straight fact. She's become very good at bluntness, if nothing else. She looks up at him and he looks at her.

"Seduce me," he says, and sips his vodka. She feels her face grow hot and she looks down.

"I don't think that would be entirely appropriate, Comrade--"

"No, I said seduce me, not be coy." Her breath rattles in her chest and she sits there a moment, silent. "Tell me how you're going to become a _vdovy_."

For a moment, she closes her eyes, and she thinks of her dance for the Generals that she will do in the morning. She thinks of her pointe shoes, and the grace and precision and confidence of dancing.  She thinks of being admired, and being thought of as weak and fragile when she knows--has done--she can crush a man's neck between her thighs.

So she tells the _Soldat_ about dancing the Infernal Dance of Katschei from _Zhar-ptitsa_.  She speaks of her perfection, of all her long hours practicing her pointe. And as she does, she slides the buttons from her blouse one by one. He never seems to look at her. She brushes her hair over one shoulder, combing through it. Recently, they gave her something that turned it from its mousy blond to a more vivid red, and she is still, occasionally, startled by it; but now, she runs her fingers through, bending in toward him as she describes her flexibility, and for the briefest of moments, his eyes dip to the line of her blouse and the peak of breasts underneath.

When she moves onto his lap, she's babbling a bit, just making words come out to keep him distracted, though she knows he's not. He's calculating, he's allowing her to do this, and she knows this is no seduction for him. She waits, a part of her bated and terrified, for him to stop this.

But he cup her hip with his only flesh hand, and he doesn't stop her until her lips are against his ear, hot breath on his skin.

"You're very good at this," he says, and she stills for a moment. "Seduction isn't about letting a man fuck you, _mysha_ , it's about making a man think you would let him."

Her breath rattles in her chest and she touches his shoulders, can feel the seam of his metal arm at his shoulder where it sits under his shirt. Her fingers slide down and pluck at the buttons of his shirt.

"And if I follow through on letting him?"

_Zima Soldat_ kisses with far more heat and vigor and enthusiasm than Natalia thought was possible for a man. She meets him, tit for tat, like one of their sparring matches that have taught her to respect his mechanical arm, to fear it out of respect for what it can do to a man. He lifts her in his arms and goes to his bed, and when she shyly strips away her clothing for him, he pauses.

"Were you planning this?"

"I had hoped," she admits, very soft. He runs his fingers through her hair and looks at her curiously. She pulls his metal hand to her mouth and she kisses the fingers, soft-lipped and slow.

"I can't feel it," he tells her, which she knew, or supposed at least. It doesn't stop her taking two digits into her mouth to warm them with her hot breath and slick tongue; and he might not be able to feel it, but it doesn't mean he doesn't react.

When she writhes against him, panting and needy, he hesitates.

"If I hurt you--"

"You won't," she tells him, though the thought terrifies her. "I trust you."

It makes him smile, and she thinks there is another man above her for a moment. "You are either very brave, _mysha_ , or very stupid."

He is as gentle with her as he can be. She bites her lip when he presses into her, slick and hot but still unfamiliar with anything larger than her own slender fingers. He breathes into the space of her neck and shoulder, cautious, waiting for her to move beneath him.

"Is this your first time, Natalia?"

She realizes, hazily, that that is the first time he's ever called her by her given name, and she decides that Natalia is not so bad a name.

"I didn't want to give it to a target," she murmurs to his hair, and he nods on her skin.

In a swift movement, he reverses them, so that she is straddling his hips and he is sunk so deep inside her it drives a noise from her mouth that she didn't know she could make. Her nails bring up red furrows on his shoulders, and he bucks her up into motion, hips steady and insistent as she rides him. She closes her eyes and pants, soft and breathless and worried for the soundproofing in his room, touching her breasts when she's not anchoring herself on his shoulders. He touches her in kind, fleeting moments--a brush of knuckles on her ribs, leaning up to kiss the swell of her breast and nip at her skin, the chilled-but-warming brush of metal that sparks hideous, wanting warmth in her belly and makes her slam her hips down on his and grind for the friction of it.

It seems a lifetime for them to come off of it. Her orgasm bubbles up in her belly and spine, a warmth that plateaus until she's whining and he shifts his angle just so, and then it's too much, her knees squeezing his ribs. He slides out of her, and she curls against him, brushing her hair out of the way as she strokes him and tastes herself on him as she uses her mouth--something she has done before, more than once now, and he seems to know, because he's not nearly so kind with fucking her mouth as he was with her cunt.

They lay, disarrayed, for some time after, until Natalia says, "Your food will be cold."

In the morning, when she dances, she is sore and aching in her hips. It makes her fluid and languid and womanly, the bow in her thighs. It earns her their recognition and title and the training she's strained for for six years now.

She's not quite sure how it happens, but between missions and his long, lingering absences, they manage to sneak away and remind themselves of their humanities, until one day, Natalia wakes up and _Zima Soldat_ is a ghost.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Events in this chapter take place in 1984 and late 1989/early 1990 respectively. Much shorter than the last, and significantly more tame.

She has no name, that she can remember, but she has many things that she is called, some of them kinder than others. She remembers, there used to be many girls, many young women just like her; but where they have failed even trying their hardest, she has succeeded, she has grown and changed and filled the void, until all there is left is her.

They call her a great many things, these days, all of them wreathing her in smoke and sin and death. The ones that stick with her the most remind her of the toxic mingling of her deadliness and femininity--spider, widower, _chernaya vdova_. She can't recall if she's ever had a name, not with bruises radiating from her temples and a gun in her hand.

Her first run in with S.H.I.E.L.D is before the fall of the Soviets, but while _krasno-zal_ is in upheaval and change. Her commanding officers have been disposed of, but theirs are still in control, and so she has a mission, a target, a meaning. There are defectors that need dealing with, and she is the best one to deal with them--silent and deadly and small.

But there are men here, men who are expecting some push back from her organization, and while she is perfectly capable of handling herself even in the face of all this, it does complicate the mission a bit. She battens down the distaste she has for complications, and ruins their plans to safeguard her target. In her frustration, she works over a couple of S.H.I.E.L.D agents as well, asking them their mission, asking what this disloyal defector means to their knowledge.

She takes a bullet in the side on the third day of her interrogation of one of the agents, and the pain is enough distraction that she has to retreat and deal with her wounds, leaving her source of information open.

She watches the cold brutality with which the compromised agent is removed from the picture and wonders if her new superior officers will do the same with her. A part of her, the nameless girl that still hides in the corners of her mind, admires the man that took out the tortured agent--was it really the corking of a leak, or was it some tender mercy, to kill a man pained by her tortures?

The next time she has a run in with S.H.I.E.L.D is in Berlin as the wall is coming down, and she is face to face with that agent that dealt with her source years before. He has aged, where she has not, but not much; he is still young but now there is a patch over one eye and scars radiating out from it. She lets him see her for a moment, and then she is gone, a ghost in the press of bodies tearing at concrete and rebar and the very real image of their inclosure.

That is the year of Budapest. It's four months later, Hungary in disarray as Germany had been, and she does not see the dark S.H.I.E.L.D agent of the last two encounters, but sees a young man--a boy, really, a mere teenager with a bow and deadly accuracy fighting against men with guns and a good seventy pounds on him. He's pinned down in a building, and she is leading the men who would kill him. She doesn't know what stops her from letting them, but she calls for their cease fire and goes into that building to see that boy.

He trains an arrow on her, quicker and quieter than she was expecting, and she stands there, trying to remember her English.

He speaks Russian in an atrocious accent that recalls some long dead memory in her.  "I'm meant to kill you," he says.

"So do it," she replies. She expects his hands to shake, expects an opening.

There is none.

He doesn't kill her, but for all _krasno-zal_ knows, he does. She doesn't know why she lets him bring her in, what it is that drives her into this snake pit. She doesn't know what memories are there, waiting for her on the other side of her bruised temples. But something about his earnest inability to be frightened of killing a woman, she thinks she has made the right decision to run.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Events are nebulously between 1990 and 1993, though Natasha's not really aware of the time passing until she actually encounters Clint in the upcoming chapters. Sorry about not updating, I've been in the processing of moving! Another short and tame one.

Coming undone, being rebuilt, is one of the worst experiences of her life. There are days, whole weeks, where she speaks nothing but Russian, and suffers for it because the men in their dark suits do not want her to speak Russian. There are an equal number of days where she does nothing but scream until she's hoarse, tortured but things she can only half remember--pain, faces she doesn't recognize, violence she can't quite recall, blood on her hands that she can feel but that isn't properly there.

On her most lucid days, the dark man with the eye patch comes to see her. He sits across from her in the small cubicle they've given her. He never says very much. Some days, he brings food, particularly if she has been without; some days, he comes with paperwork and uses his time in her cell to process through it. He never questions her, never pays her much mind at all, and she as at once wary of him and infinitely grateful of his kindness. She knows, in this lucidity, that it was not only at the discretion of that boy in Budapest, that she ended up in this cell.

One day, after she has been in this dark, featureless cell for months, she asks the man with the eye patch, "Who was the boy in Budapest?"

"Oh, so you do speak English." She makes a face at him. _Of course_ she spoke English, what sort of spy would she be if she didn't spoke English, especially a spy that worked for the Russians. "He's an Agent."

"He's a boy."

"We're not here to talk about him," the man says, and closes the book he was reading, looking up at her final. She looks across the space at him.

"What are we here to talk about then, Director Fury? Because all your Agents seem to want to talk about is what I can tell them about the Red Room, and I don't know if I can tell them much more than what your files already know."

The man smiles a little bit, just the smallest upturn of his mouth, and she's surprised at that. She had expected a great many expressions, but one of pleasure wasn't one of them.

Fury sets the book he was reading down beside his chair and then looks up at her.

"You know," he says, "we don't even know what to call you? We know that your organization called you girls the Black Widows, but I'm sure you had a name at some point besides that."

She is very quiet, brows furrowed. After a while, he stands up.

"We'll talk about that some other time."

A few days later, she's moved from her dark, windowless cell to a small dormitory that overlooks a small courtyard. The window does not open and the door locks from the outside. But the room is much lighter and there is room enough that she can move around. She stretches and moves, and Fury continues to come and sit quietly while she watches him. Occasionally, he'll bring a chess board. She's infinitely better at the game than he is, but she occasionally lets him get further than the opening moves, just for the sport of it.

After several weeks of mindless small talk--questions about what Russia was like (he had never been) and what languages she could speak (seventeen, she thinks, but maybe more, and she can probably read more) and if she'd ever been to a museum before--she tells him, when he comes in one day, "Natalia Alianovna Romanova"

He sits down with a thick file. "That's an awful big name."

She shrugs a little bit. "I've heard bigger."

He gets that little ghost of a smile again, and she allows herself a tiny bit of a smile as well. He flips open the file, and on the first page is a short evaluation with a picture of the boy, a few years grown, from Budapest. He holds it out toward her and she takes it, looking down at his photograph.

"He's in need of a more experienced Agent to handle him. While you're not exactly S.H.I.E.L.D experienced, you have more experience with deep cover than anyone else I have.  I'd like--"

"I'll do it."

Fury lifts a brow at her and she looks up at him, unfolding from the cot and handing the paper back.

"I owe him one anyway. I promise he'll come back in one piece."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey this is a chapter that has sex in it, even though it's pretty fast and vague! It's Clint/Natasha sex! And since I'm writing this not-my-normal computer, I don't have my timeline, but I'm pretty sure Clint's only 18 or something according to my headcanon!

He's a child, still, but he's grown considerably. Filled out. His cheeks have slimmed but his jaw has widened and he's lost a bit of that gaunt, gangly look he had in Budapest.

And he is, at least, better at pretending not to stare when compared to their mission handlers. Which is saying something, considering their mission handlers are grown men, and he is still only a child.

"So," he says, leaning across the van toward her. His gaze ducks to her breasts for a moment and then back up. "So, were you really born in the thirties?"

"That's what they think," she says. "I don't remember, obviously. But I also obviously wasn't born in 1984, which is what my file says."

He laughs, a soft little noise, and nods a bit, sitting back. He holds his bow to his chest like a lifeline. It's a strange choice in weapons. His eyes linger on her hips when she splays her legs out like all the other men out on their transport.

At their station, where they watch their target for hours that feel like a millennia each, his eyes continue to linger.

"You don't look like you were born in the thirties," he finally decides, and says it with the sort of final authority that all teenagers have. She looks at him evenly.

"You don't look like you're old enough to grow a beard yet," she says, and he laughs. It makes her smile that he isn't too proud to not laugh at the ribbing. She remembers, proud men tend to be more liable to cause issues. They are not the most coordinated of teams on that first mission, but it goes well. He is an excellent marksmen and though their communication could use improvement, they don't need to call in any reinforcements, and they get the mission done well before schedule, and with minimal damage. She allows him to inspect the small nicks and cuts on her legs from one of his grenade arrows-- _I made them myself_ he proclaims proudly--as they wait for extraction, and his hand stays, warm and familiar, much too high on her inner thigh.

They are debriefed. Under the table, she touches over the crease where his thigh meets his hip. His knee impacts the table loud enough to draw attention, but her face belies nothing. Their handler squints at them critically, and she's sure he's trying to not blush.

When they're released, she says simply, "We should work on our coordination."

"Is that what that was back there?" he asks, sounding a little breathless. "Team coordination?"

"No, that was me seeing if you were sexually interested in me. I was having a hard time reading if you were attracted to women or not."

His face gets pretty when it flushes. She gives him the key to her room and tells him the number, and he mumbles something vague about _protocols_ and _fraternization_ that mostly trails off as she unzips her body suit a half inch more, revealing the swell of her breast.

He comes late in the evening, through her window, dressed in street clothes. She is just leaving the shower, using her towel to dry her hair, and is naked besides. He stands at the window silently, gaping at her a bit.

"You look like a fish," she says, and drapes the towel over the back of a chair, then sits on the bed. He swallows thickly. "Have you ever been with someone before, Barton?"

"A couple, yeah."

She lifts a leg and crooks a finger at him. He takes off his shirt as he approaches the bed. He has none of the predatory grace of the Soldier, that she vaguely remembers, nor the clumsy heavy handedness of some of the targets she seduced through the years; just an earnest, boyish clumsiness.

He doesn't try to fumble straight into intercourse. He kisses her, once, on the mouth, and then all over her neck, and she is surprised at how good he is at that. She hasn't kissed many people. He touches her, slowly, exploring her--his cool, calloused fingers with short, chipped nails on her nipples; his bony elbows pressing her knees apart to test her flexibility; the strength of his thumbs and forefingers digging into her ankles as he kisses up her calves and thighs and then between them. She sighs, winding her fingers into his hair as he licks along her cunt, groaning into her a bit. He's less good at eating her than he was at kissing, but she is willing to forgive that for his enthusiasm and eagerness to please, occasionally pulling back to ask how he's doing, how she likes it, what he needs to do to make her feel better.

She's never had anyone care about her pleasure before, that she remembers. She guides it, softly breathed, "Harder" and "No, now to the left" or "Oh, right there, _right there_ " as she works her hips on his tongue and his finger. He must be hard, she knows, but he never pulls his mouth away from her, except to kiss or bite her thighs and ask again, "Like this? Like this?"

She lets herself orgasm twice before she pulls on his hair. He pulls away from her twitching cunt, face shiny.

"Inside me," she says.

"I haven't got rubbers," he says meekly, cheeks all pink.

She shrugs and pulls him up, kissing his filthy mouth and opening his pants to reach inside. He groans when she touches him, and she's impressed by his fortitude, for how desperately stiff he is.

"Not without a rubber," he says again, shaking his head a little. "Not inside."

She peers at him curiously, gripping him still, and then pushes him back onto his ass. He looks ready to do up his pants, but then she curls between his legs and breathes over him. He tilts his head back and swears at the ceiling, "Fuck, Tasha."

"Nobody's ever called me _that_ before," she says, then licks up him and sucks the head. He says nothing to that, biting his wrist and whimpering.

He doesn't last long, and she congratulates him on his fortitude for lasting as long as he did in his pants. When he's done in her mouth, she pulls back, casually walks to the bathroom, and washes out her mouth after spitting in the sink.

He's done up his pants and is sitting on the edge of the bed nervously when she returns, now wrapped in a robe.

"Was that okay?"

"That's a silly question," she says. "We both got off."

"...yeah, but," he says, and then falters a little bit, picking at a cut on his knuckles. "I don't want things to get weird."

She tilts her head a bit and then touches his hair consolingly. He leans into the affection, like he's starved for it, and she isn't quite sure what the swelling in her chest is.

"Things won't get weird, Barton. I promise."


End file.
